This chapter provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary formation of postsecular studies and briefly outlines its influence in literary studies broadly as well nineteenth-century literary studies specifically. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women then provides a case study for the demonstration of a postsecular reading attending to the production of secularity around the novel’s bifurcated but intertwined concern with playfulness and morality.

This chapter traces the complex legacies of multiple religious traditions, including Christianity, Islam, and syncretistic spirituality, as they inform utopian strands of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American fiction, including the miraculous realism of Toni Morrison, the lyrical historicism of Marilynne Robinson, and the religiously themed science fiction of James Blish and G. Willow Wilson. Apocalyptic concepts, with a strong emphasis on transformative and liberatory possibility, are a recurrent element of these narratives.  The term “spirituality” itself is ambiguous, particularly in a national context in which religion has been a source of both oppression and hope. The chapter draws on postsecular critiques of literature and culture that, in John McClure’s terms, indicate “a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religion.” It argues that skeptical perspectives do not necessarily militate against the aesthetic and ethical potential of theologically oriented utopian fiction.

Chapter 2 connects histories of the English Bible to histories of the English novel. When culture is understood to be a kind of secular scripture, the intellectual problems involved in telling the origins of the English novel – that is, the change that occurs in English prose fiction during the eighteenth century – do not get resolved so much as displaced by other problems, such as the rise of the middle class (Ian Watt) or the twin crises of truth and virtue (Michael McKeon) or the advent of the print-media entertainment industry (William Warner). This chapter discusses a recent exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library commemorating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, two passages from Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), and Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory to suggest how we might approach culture differently in literary studies and how we might thereby reassemble the secular at the origins of the English novel in a way that opens up new questions about novelistic realism. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of why it matters to think through the postsecular and the postcritical together.